There was a time in my life that a hundred dollars sounded like a lot
of money. It sounded like so much that I thought I only really
needed half of that so when my dad found a bit of dirty work for a
hundred dollars I offered half of the money to my friend if he would
do the job with me. The job was to remove the cat and cat piss
infested insulation from underneath mobile home for a older couple
and then load it onto a trailer and haul it to the dump and unload
it. Easy money. Cole and I headed over there one morning bright and
early full of hope and the dreams of what a crisp fifty would buy
us. We quickly found out why we were being played so relatively well
for a couple of teenagers it was because this job was absolutely
bull-crap. The insulation was hanging down in tatters and the air was
full of cat pee and dander and dust and fiberglass particles. It felt
so bad in our lungs that it seemed like we should take up smoking to
clear our lungs. After a couple of hours my friends mom came by and
checked on us and made fun of us a little for how terrible we looked.
We worked about seven hours before we had the last of the infectious
and carcinogenic mess loaded into a trailer ready for haul away and
my dad came and drove us over to the dump where we still had to
unload our cargo under the watchful eyes of our majestic
garbage-eating state bird. We got home dirty and with our eyes
swollen and irritated and exhausted but fifty dollars richer. That
was not nearly enough I concluded as I laid in a tub of scalding
water trying to soak the fiberglass our of my tender skin. You would
think that deciding that we had been underpaid would cure us from
further enticements but when a second hundred was dangled we were
back under the same mobile home removing the axles and that money was
more in line with the chance of long-term damage to our lungs and
psyches.
